The Palm Pre launch and the evolving realities of product reviews

In the late 1990s, I worked with a stellar team of PR people supporting HP's NetServer division. One of my tasks was to make sure that we built a plan to make HP the #1 ranked server family amongst its competitors including IBM, Compaq and Dell. From the time we started to the time we ended, HP rose from a qualitiative perspective to the best reviewed product line in the space. To discuss how we did that would be a different blog - but it involved a lot of work, relationship management with product reviewers and sometimes making difficult decisions about when NOT to be in a competitive product review.

Fast forward to today, where two of my former colleagues, Lynn Fox and Jon Zilber work at Palm. As you may have heard leading up to CES in early January, Palm needed a home run with the launch of the Pre.

They got it.

Palm's stock was up 35% on January 9 right after all of the CES buzz hit and as of this blog posting a week later has almost doubled again.

The Palm Pre got many best of show awards and an obscene amount of positive media coverage at CES that is the hallmark of Lynn and Jon's careers, but the most interesting award to me as an old product review guy was the CNET People's Voice award, decided by over 10,000 CNET readers.

Great PR people still play a vital role in product reviews and awards. But now more than ever I hear clients talk about reader choice awards/consumer opinions. Amazon.com offers aggregate consumer ratings on a wide range of products, including software. Many publications have reader's choice awards. ePinions and Yelp offer reviews for consumers, by consumers.

In this environment, among the most important people in your product reviews initiatives are not your PR team but your product development teams. Social media plays a key role in helping product designers know what consumers are talking about and what they want. Monitoring blogs, Twitter feeds and other forums can help designers understand their target user pain points. The problem is how to sift through all of this information - but there are a growing number of ways to do this.

Having an active ear to the ground doesn't replace great vision - but it sure helps.

Intel and social media

Intel has, for the length of my professional career, been masterful at marketing (nevermind the Pentium FDIV bug).

Beyond the famous "Intel Inside" campaign, Intel also has a well deserved reputation for being extraordinarily disciplined in its announcements of new products. Simply put, an entire ecosystem of businesses rely on Intel processors - so Intel customers and partners have intense opinions about how and when it launches new chipsets. In the late 90s, I worked with HP on their Netserver line of Intel-based servers - I learned that Intel culturally became unusually disciplined and sometimes tight lipped during product launches - sometimes to the chagrin of partners like HP.

In other words, I would have anticipated that culturally Intel might struggle in the new world of social media. Could they transfer from the highly coordinated communication efforts of the late 90s to a world where engineers, partners and millions of other interested individuals blog - where one accidental posting could ruin the announcements for partners such as HP, IBM or Dell?

This year, I've been very impressed with Intel as it tackles social media. Members of Intel's team include Kelly Feller and Michael Brito.

A few of the impressive steps this team has taken just over the past month:
- Intel launched it's public social media guidelines.
- Intel launched the "What's Inside You" contest.

It is cool to see Intel - a company who might culturally have very good reasons to drag its feet on its social media front - become so active. It's also cool to see their Intel "What's inside you" campaign - it reminds me of a few contests we've run at Page One for Fortune 500 companies (we can't name) and a small Japanese company called Plat'Home.

Social Media, parenting and popcorn

I recently had an interesting email exchange with Connie Bensen before her presentation at the Social Media Strategies conference in San Francisco. I was unable at the last minute to attend the conference, but Connie was nice enough to point me to a few of her recent experiences.

Connie is a newer member of the thoughtful and visionary Network Solutions social media team.

While Network Solutions certainly has earned some recognition for their commitment to social media (heck, even their lawyers are involved in active online response), the thing that struck me most was a link she pointed me to of a 10 year old Cub Scout.



This 10 year old took an entirely new approach to the age old task of selling popcorn/chocolate/coupon books as a fund raiser. Whereas my memories of childhood were going door to door and asking people to buy chocolate bars - this kid expanded his vision, teamed with a non profit and built his own social media campaign. The campaign was called PopcornForKids. His goal was to "give some fancy Cub Scout popcorn" to as many of kids who struggle with meals every day - not as matter of sustenance - but as an unexpected way to show people care about them. The boy teamed with Feeding America as a part of his project.

I can't speak to this success of this particular campaign. However, I can speak to the glimmer of hope that the social media work I'm involved with at Page One PR will also be good for me as a dad as my kids look for ideas to support their own fundraisers and groups - not to mention their greater ideals.

SEO and PR - Deciding Who Gets The Exclusive

My colleague Nadja Blagojevic wrote an interesting blog on SEO and PR last week on the Page One PR blog.

We have growing appreciation for metrics-based pr at Page One. It's an exciting time for us as we see more data than ever before about how public relations can impact sales.

As we get more involved with SEO for our clients - some small changes begin to creep into our planning.

One example: we have always been faced with the question of who to give an exclusive to when we are making an announcement. Often times we don't give an exclusive, but in the times that we do, how do we pick the right blogger or reporter?

A number of variables go into this question:
- Personal relationships between our client and the blogger/reporter
- What reporters might be most interested in the announcement?

Now, as we get more involved in SEO, there is a new element to consider: does a reporter's site generally provide links to our client sites? This link is gold for our clients from an SEO perspective - and we are beginning to pay attention to what publications do link back as we consider who to give exclusives to.

For example:
- eWeek includes links back to companies they cover. For example, see this story last week on OpenLogic.
- InformationWeek does too - as evidenced by this article on OpenLogic.

However, there are still some very well known publications in tech arena who only include links in their articles to content on their own web site. They have good business decisions for not funneling traffic off of their own web site.

But the reality is the companies these publications cover are beginning to pay attention to how articles can impact organic search results, and link backs are a key component.

If you are a reporter who thrives on exclusives - you should realize if your publication doesn't link to the companies you cover - your ability to secure exclusives will dwindle.

Does a joke need a punch line?

A quick joke: How long do chickens work?

Would it matter to you if I don't tell you the punch line? Many people tout the number of views of YouTube videos as a metric - but there is currently no way to know how much of your video people watched. If they just watch for a second then stop - is it the same as hearing a joke with no punch line?

Videos are a new tool in PR. As just one example, my former colleague Josh Morgan, who started MorganDorado PR in Sacramento, has a number of videos for his clients on YouTube.

As PR people start to make more videos, we design videos with a punch line. Or if not a punch line, we have content that we want you to see.

But how are video viewers tracked?

As my colleague Craig Oda points out, YouTube Insights can be interesting - you can see viewer's gender and age. In Craig's case, the largest viewer group for his family videos are males 35-44 (my family videos tend to be more popular in the 35-44 female crowd).

My question is: when will we have access to information that provides insight into how long people watch each video?

We've done a handful of video programs for clients at Page One. Some are designed to be viral within specific audiences. These videos fit into a larger strategic campaign - so often our metrics for success are defined through a myriad of stats (sales; number of blogs and articles pointing to the video; number of actions, such as votes, for a campaign, etc). Still, we generally look at the total number of viewers.

But when does a viewer become a a viewer according to YouTube? Should somebody who watches 5 seconds of your video be counted the same as somebody who watches to entire video?

According to TubeMogul, YouTube counts a viewer when the video starts. So if you watch for 2 seconds, you are counted the same as someone who watches for 3 minutes.

Google and YouTube understand the power of metrics. But it will be good when YouTube, and it's underlying technology, can provide insights into how long videos are watched.

Oh, the answer to the joke: Around the cluck.

Should Barbie Tweet?

For any social media follower, it’s no news that there is an active debate right now – how should large brands monitor social media conversations and what internal departments should manage the online conversations? PR? Marketing? Customer service? Market research?

That answer remains elusive as each industry is fighting to come up with the best answer under the pressure that the immediacy of social media brings. I want to look at the market research industry in particular and explore its recent enthusiasm toward tracking social media conversations.

To be fair, I'm not a trained marketing research professional. I don't belong to ARF (the Advertising Research Foundation). I think it's funny to say ARF to my 5 year old. I feel a smug kinship with Bernard Loomis, the iconic American toy developer and marketer who helped market toys including Barbie, Hot Wheels and Strawberry Shortcake when he said, "The trouble with research is that it tells you what people were thinking about yesterday, not tomorrow. It's like driving a car using a rearview mirror.”



I’ve initiated informal research surveys in my day. Often times, my surveys are a lighthearted and fun way to extend a PR campaign. What do Americans think about cell phone etiquette? What celebrities are listed the most in open source code? My experience is that media eats this stuff up and resulting media coverage is off the charts.

Outside of my examples, market research is a serious activity. In 2005, American businesses spent more than $7 billion a year on market research – worldwide it was closer to $20 billion.

This past Monday on September 22, the best of the best of the market research industry gathered in New York City at the Advertising Research Foundation's half-day event on the role of social media as it relates to market research.

Panel members included Jonathan Carson, president, international, Nielsen Online; Jeff Flemings, SVP/director of renaissance planning at Publicis' new account planning shop, VivaKi; and Jim Nail, chief strategy and marketing officer, TNS Cymfony.

Joel Research, the Chief Research Officer at ARF excitedly wrote in his blog leading up to the conference that social media was making researchers “the new rock stars” of the business world.

Why the enthusiasm?
- Research is showing that consumers trust other consumers (friends, colleagues, etc) more than any other source.
- Consumer postings online are the 3rd most powerful influencer
- Marketers' marketing and research has traditionally been limited to the "brand backyard"--forums like customer care and the brand's Web site. It is now shifting to the "consumer backyard": Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Tweet, Twitter and the like.

So it is no surprise that the market research industry is all abuzz about the monitoring of social media. And the big prize is like Cold Fusion at this point – we’ll see who figures out the best strategy, but as of yet, the race is simply on.

Dell social media is soooo 2007 - What about Joe's House of Sushi?

Dell has received a lot of high praise for its social media efforts since the beginning of 2007, especially since the launch of the Dell community site IdeaStorm (where, among other activities, members can give and vote on Dell product ideas):
- Jon Fortt from Fortune Magazine featured Dell in his Sept 4 piece on how Dell has listened to and communicated with customers online on IdeaStorm, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
- Dell has won a number of awards, including the 2007 Forrester Groundswell Award; the Wired.com 2008 Rheingold Award; and the 2008 PR Week "PR Innovation of the Year 2008".

So Dell gets social media. Dell gets media. Or maybe Dell gets self promotion. As Fortt's article points out:

The real question is whether customer-friendly operations like IdeaStorm translate to better financials. The jury's still out on that. (Dell's gross margins have increased to 19.1%, up from 16.6% last year, thanks mostly to cost cutting. Staying at that level won't be easy - Dell has been lowering prices, which helped cause a 17% fall in profits last quarter.) The jury's also out on whether IdeaStorm reflects the opinions of the average Dell buyer. Many of the sites' most popular ideas involve adding the open-source Linux operating system instead of Windows. If IdeaStorm votes were a true gauge of customers, Linux PCs should be flying off the shelves. They're not. "How much better is this as a way to measure customer demand?" wonders Mike Gotta, analyst at Burton Group, a consulting firm. "It's not proven yet."

Or we could take a look at the Dell stock price since the social media campaign started in early 2007 (note the increase of stock price from around $26 in early 2007 to about $26 in Sept 2008 before last week's financial madness):



I wonder if there is another, less-hyped business that deserves as much visibility as Dell for its social media efforts. Or maybe thousands of businesses. My colleague recently blogged on how her friends are getting responses from restaurant owners after posting restaurant reviews/comments on Yelp. In one case, a person complained about a restaurant opening - and was offered up free food by the restaurant.

So as we wait for Dell financials to prove out that their much celebrated online initiatives make business sense - maybe we look toward the work of small restaurant owners for true social media innovation. Unless of course they go out of business giving away free food.